I’d call this rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but maybe only once the ship hit bottom. Joe Biden’s rhetoric on border enforcement and asylum touched off the worst border crisis in decades, a catastrophe which his own Democratic allies warned was coming. The Biden administration has responded to this crisis by, er … issuing an Orwellian edict forbidding the speaking of certain terms by bureaucrats.

That’ll do the trick!

The Biden administration has ordered U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to stop using terms such as “alien,” “illegal alien” and “assimilation” when referring to immigrants in the United States, a rebuke of terms widely used under the Trump administration.

The change is detailed in memos sent Monday to department heads at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, the nation’s chief enforcers of federal immigration laws, according to copies obtained by The Washington Post. It is part of an ongoing effort to reverse President Donald Trump’s hard-line policies and advance Biden’s efforts to build a more “humane” immigration system.

Among the changes: “Alien” will become “noncitizen or migrant,” “illegal” will become “undocumented,” and “assimilation” will change to “integration.”

Well, at least the Biden administration has its priorities in order. They’re not actually interested in fixing the problem; they just want to demonize those who describe it, using perfectly acceptable terms. This isn’t about building a more “humane” immigration system — it’s a distraction from the Biden administration’s failures, and the resulting explosion of inhumane conditions created by Biden’s incompetence.

The idea that changing the lexicon in this Orwellian manner produces a more humane outcome is ludicrous on its face, especially as none of these terms were “inhumane” in the first place. “Alien” means someone from another country, and applies whether they enter legally or not. For that matter, “illegal” applies to those who enter the country by breaking the law, and is the opposite of “legal” immigrants, a distinction that the latter would no doubt prefer to continue. As for “assimilation,” that is a different concept than “integration.” Integration relates to existing internal communities, while assimilation refers to the process of external entrants conforming to their country of choice.

More to the point: does this Deployment of the Euphemisms increase border security in any fashion? Does it reduce the massive overcrowding of kids in Biden’s cages by a single child? Does it stop even one human trafficker from exploiting the poor and putting their lives in danger? Of course not, and that’s the point. Neither is anything else Biden’s doing, so he wants to rewrite the English language in order to distract from his complete and ongoing failure.